Primary Menu

Photography

Biography

Who is Alan Klughammer?

I love to help people. From volunteering in the community to sharing the beauty of this world through photography, I believe in positive thinking.

I was born in Calgary in the early 1960?s, but, at the age of 10, my family moved to a small town in the interior of British Columbia where I was struck by the beauty of mountains, lakes and forests. My Dad gave me an old twin lens reflex camera and I was hooked on the magic of photography. Some of my favourite childhood memories involve climbing the local mountains and recording the pictorial vistas. However, the social life of a small town did not appeal, so immediately after high school, I fled to UBC in Vancouver.

The culture shock and the ego shock of not being the smartest kid in school was too much for the naive small town boy; and although I was good at math, and had a very logical mind, the path of an engineering degree did not seem to fit. I dropped out of UBC and entered art school, where I thrived. My vision evolved and matured, and I found myself drawn to details and abstract sections of the world around me as opposed to sweeping panoramas.

After graduating, I met my future ex-wife and moved to Victoria, and then Duncan on Vancouver Island. Together we ran a photofinishing business, and, in the late 1980?s, I started experimenting with digital photography. This was a perfect combination of my technical abilities, my computer skills, and my artistic eye, but it was a crash course in business management. Although the business survived for over five years, it was not strong enough to survive a divorce.

I managed a number of retail stores on Vancouver Island and the lower mainland until I moved back to Victoria to facilitate closing down a Black’s Photography location. Using my customer service skills and staff leadership I turned the store around and grew sales so much that Black’s Head office decided to renew the lease and invest in a quarter million dollar renovation. While working for Black’s, I met a number of passionate and creative people, including a very talented painter who pushed me artistically by asking “what is your work saying?” From this point, I moved my photography away from “subject oriented” images, to more abstract “emotion based” photos. People have described my photography work as “like a painting”, “working on many levels” and “something you can look at again and again” When the company I was working for closed Canadian operations in the summer of 2011, I decided to go back to school to obtain a diploma in Business Administration. Currently I am juggling a day job with my artistic career, displaying my artwork in various locations, and trying to stay involved in photography in Victoria, BC where I love with the ocean and the rainforest.